— — Renowned hair stylist Leon Tringali has a certain swagger that suggests fashion isn’t just what you wear but how you wear it.

Whatever you call it, it’s a quality and an aesthetic earned after 30 years in the fashion, art and hairstyle worlds of Western New York, Europe and New York City.

It’s a quality that students at his Williamsville school of hair design — Leon Studio One — enjoy in a hip, modern and above all open learning environment and working studio at 5221 Main St.

Since Tringali, owner of three salons in Amherst, opened the fully accredited school in 1998, some 1,500 graduates have learned the careful blend of form and function in hair styling.

Now, the native of Buffalo’s west side and globetrotting veteran of the fashion business sees North Tonawandas’ factory-gone-stylish Remington Rand project as a setting after his own heart — the perfect place to duplicate the creative but diligent environment his Williamsville school and hair salon extolls.

His small company, with close to 40 employees, grabbed top honors by Buffalo Business First in their March 26 list of “Best Places to Work in Western New York.” Tringali said another 15 to 20 full time jobs will likely accompany him to the planned 6,500 square foot studio on the Rand building’s ground floor plaza.

Rand’s developer Kissling Interests L.L.C., is already well into the $20 million rehabilitation of the building into 81 work/live lofts atop the ground floor anchor businesses (including the salon, a yoga studio and restaurant). The Kissling group has endorsed a forward looking approach in attracting prospective business tenants.

Kissling Director of Development Tom Barrett is excited he’s found that quality personified in Tringali, who acknowledged fashion and hairstyle techniques have changed since he opened his first salon in Buffalo’s Allentown district in the early 1980s.

He has explained the changes, the techniques and products to top industry manufacturers for years as a specialist.

“I never look at what happened before. I use it as a reference point,” he said. “I’m always clearly focused ahead.”

That sentiment is reflected in his Williamsville school, where several knowledge labs allow students to start cutting hair right away, slowly graduating from one, then the other in a series of partitionless sections of the building until finally working on real customers in the advanced lab at the front of the building.

“They want closed-in classrooms, I just felt like we wanted an open, visual environment,” he said, adding there was also a major need for accredited, full-service education for stylists in the area, complete with the whole range of financial aid — from Pell grants, Stafford loans to most other forms of tuition assistance.

“There was such a need to train and produce quality hairdressers and nobody was filling that need,” he said.

Two separate schools share the building’s floor space: one a 1,000-hour accredited hairstylist’ academy and another, a 600 hour skin care and spa curriculum. All graduate the 7 1/2 month to 11 1/2 month (part time) hairdressing program licensed and ready to work on their own.

Students at the school (including the other 100 to 150 expected to enroll in the soon-to-be North Tonawanda salon) work and learn amid scores of Tringali’s fashion photos, which the photo art major captured as art director for ARTec, a New York City-based company that has since been sold to Loreal.

It has all brought about the kind of name recognition for Tringali that works in conjunction with Kissling Interests’ desire for unique and successful ventures to populate the massive former factory on the Erie Canal across Sweeney Street.

It didn’t hurt, either, that Scott Lacasse of Kissling’s Buffalo offices is a client of Tringali’s.

“When they started this project, they wanted somebody with name recognition in the area,” Tringali said. “I really wasn’t familiar with North Tonawanda and when we started to do a little research we thought ‘this is a place that’s on the move,’ ” he said. “And I think it’s becoming a destination spot.”

Consulting with Lumber City Development Corp., he said, was a major factor in the his decision to buy into the Rand project.

“It’s the first time since we’ve been in business that we felt like somebody was helping us on the government level,” he said. “They really wanted us to be there and it was a major factor in our decision.”

Perhaps the greatest proof of Tringali’s innovative approach and its place in the professed “forward thinking” nature of the factory project are illustrated by his current plans to open a tattoo school, the first of its kind.

Though he is awaiting review by the state of New York before starting such a school, a curriculum and various permits have been submitted.

Perhaps nowhere else does such a school for would-be tattoo artists exist inside a New York state accredited school associated with the beauty industry.

“I’ve always thought that body art is related to the expression people have with their hair, with their makeup. And now I think it’s become so mainstream that it’s indistinguishable — it’s all one,” he said, easily turning up two or three students willing to display their tattoos. “I’d say probably 90 percent of everybody who comes in here has tattoos. It’s related to what we do. We’re always dressing up out bodies.”

Of the Remington Rand building’s aesthetic — a SOHO-style, post-industrial renaissance architecture — Tringali is no stranger even in his own profession to the idea of blending rough construction with the refined.

“We started doing that in our spaces years ago,” he said, adding at first his own blend of raw concrete floors and the industrial aesthetic was sometimes mistaken for work in progress.

“It was funny because in the beginning people didn’t understand (aesthetics) the way they do now,” he said. “They’d say ‘when are you going to finish that?’ ”

Barrett said progress on the Remington Rand project is entering a more detailed phase following months of demolition, brick restoration, asbestos clean up and other heavy duty aspects of the building’s rehabilitation and cleanup.

“I’d like to see Leon in there after the middle point of the summer... We’re just kind of getting ready for the floodgates to open,” he said.